Last night’s Astros game was one of the more interesting experiences I’ve had at Minute Maid Park. We got to the stadium with about 15 minutes left to game time and headed to the ticket window with two coupons good for four free tickets (courtesy the Race for the Pennant) plus our three season seats in hand. We only needed four tickets, so we planned to use the coupons and give the season seats away. Well, our first misstep was picking a bad ticket agent. He was new, and he didn’t even know where the handicapped seats were located in the stadium, much less how to pull up enough seats so that Jen, Jose and I could all sit with Chris.
Our coupons were good for View Deck or Mezzanine seats; the handicapped rows, while located on the Terrace Deck, are counted as View Deck. Mr. New Ticket Person didn’t know this. Mr. Assisting The New Ticket Person apparently also didn’t know this. So we ended up with tickets way the heck out in the Mezzanine — right center field and quite far away from the plate. While the view actually isn’t that bad from out there, you can’t see the wall (and therefore can’t see any catches made on the warning track) and the infield is so far away that I felt very detatched from the game. I was only half paying attention the entire night.
We also missed the entire first inning — the top because of the new ticket man and the 20 minutes it took him to get us tickets, and the bottom for an even more annoying reason! We walked in the door only to be told that no one could enter the stadium at the moment because the ticket scanners were down. No ticket scanners meant that they couldn’t scan the barcode on the ticket, which apparently meant that you couldn’t enter the stadium.
“Um….can’t you just tear the ticket in half?” we asked, only to be shot down quite rudely by the security person. A minute or two passed. “Seriously, you can’t tear the tickets?” I continued, “Because we’re missing the game!” You could hear the crowd cheering as the Astros were batting in the bottom of the 1st. “We can’t make that decision, ma’am,” was the response. A minute or two more passed. Finally, another official-looking man with a walkie-talkie ran past, looking rather frantic, and told them to start tearing the dang tickets and letting people into the stadium. And thus a couple thousand growing-more-annoyed-by-the-minute fans were finally allowed to watch the game they paid to see.
Sigh. Thankfully, the night was salvaged when the Astros actually managed to win a game. Wandy Rodriguez pitched seven innings of shutout baseball, and Houston won 4-1.
As for the latest update from Brian the European traveler, well, I think my brother is trying to give Cari a run for her money. By my count, he left the US on May 15 plus or minus a couple days, which means he’s been in Europe for almost four weeks. His latest email, covering a 10-14 day period I think, reads like a laundry list of cities: Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Lucern, Interlaken, Zurich, Budapest, and Vienna.
An excerpt: “Then I went to Lucern and Interlaken in Switzerland. They were both very pretty with mountains and lakes and all. Interlaken is an extreme sports mecca of Europe, and we went ‘Canyon Jumping’ and ‘Paragliding.’ The canyon jump is a 90 meter high jump (about the length of a football field) with 50 meters free fall and then you swing an 75mph through a canyon. It was pretty scary, but a lot of fun. Paragliding was a little less scary but very cool, and we could see a lot of stuff from up in the air, its similar to hanggliding. I also rented a scooter one day and rode up into the mountains to see waterfalls. It was fun until I accidentally knocked the bike over and broke the side mirror…”
Heh.
Steeeve says
Hey, no complaining. We went to Monday night’s game. That was a buummer.
Cari says
Not quite there, but he’s certainly getting close and he’s bested me on a country; I’ve never been to Hungary.